Monday, March 19, 2012

Oretum

Archaeologists, and palaeoanthropologists, like one to one
correspondence between bits of earth, the lumps of rock and bone that they find
in them, and the time. This coherence keeps things simple. They like to be able
to say ‘this was a Neanderthal site from 55ka and so we know that the parietal
bone of this and therefore neighbouring populations was slightly more robust than
in Northern Europe, the disposition of at least one of the bodies tells us that
they buried their dead, further symbolic behaviour is shown by the paintings on
the walls, the metal rings which might have been put on their fingers, the
traces of ochre with which they painted their faces and we see that they also
ate shellfish, possibly in a ceremonial fashion…’

Believe it or not, they like to be able to say things like
that. But there are sites, many sites, which are not clearly and pristinely
associated with one time and people and activity, but are more like these
mysterious young women who at the age of 18 have 5 children by 6 different
fathers, and 3 of their former boyfriends and at least two of their current
ones are in prison for beating up blokes they caught her with in the toilets at
the disco. Like her, such sites are ‘associated’ with just about anything and
anyone who set eyes on them. (I say mysterious because, although they are all
over the Daily Mail, and entire neighbourhoods seem to consist of nothing else,
when I was young they were bloody hard to find.)

Anyhow, one such place is Oretum, in the south of the
province, a hill on the very banks of the river Jabalón. It’s primary interest
is as the capital of the Iberian tribe the Oretani, but from the Neolithic onwards,
it seems everyone has been using it. The Iberians, Celtiberians, Romans, Visigoths,
Arabs and the mediaeval and modern Christians have all been there and left
traces of their occupation.

You need someone to tell you what all the bits are, and to
try to string together the story of the place and relate it to the rocks and
the river and all the rest, and to other events in other places. I didn’t have
that, but it’s fun to have a look around. I had ridden there and had to ride
back, so it was a quick covering of the ground, during which I discovered I had
no battery in the camera, and I had to start pedalling again. But it’s curious
to think that thousands of years’ worth of individuals have lived and dies at
that spot, in a great variety of ways.